Abstract
Considering the need to develop general scheduling problem solver, the recent integration of Petri Nets as modeling tools into effective optimization methods for scheduling problems is very promising. The paper addresses a Petri Net modeling and decomposition method for solving a wide variety of scheduling problems. The scheduling problems are represented as the optimal transition firing sequence problems for timed Petri Nets. The Petri Net is decomposed into several subnets in which each subproblem can be easily solved by Dijkstra' algorithm. The approach is applied to a flowshop scheduling problem. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with that of a simulated annealing method.
